The Gendarme

• Author: Mark Mustian
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Publication Date: September 2, 2010
• Publisher: Berkley Books

What would you do if the love of your life, and all your memories, were lost- only to reappear, but with such shocking revelations that you wish you had never remembered…

Emmett Conn is an old man, near the end of his life. A World War I veteran, he’s been affected by memory loss since being injured during the war. To those around him, he’s simply a confused man, fading in and out of senility. But what they don’t know is that Emmett has been beset by memories, of events he and others have denied or purposely forgotten.

In Emmett’s dreams he’s a gendarme, escorting Armenians from Turkey. A young woman among them, Araxie, captivates and enthralls him. But then the trek ends, the war separates them. He is injured. Seven decades later, as his grasp on the boundaries between past and present begins to break down, Emmett sets out on a final journey, to find Araxie and beg her forgiveness.

Mark Mustian has written a remarkable novel about the power of memory-and the ability of people, individually and collectively, to forget. Depicting how love can transcend nationalities, politics, and religion, how racism creates divisions where none truly exist, and how the human spirit fights to survive even in the face of hopelessness, The Gendarme is a transcendent novel.

This is a tough book for me to review, since there were some issues that came up for me while reading. One of my oldest friends that I’m still in touch with is descended from survivors of the Armenian genocide, which is still not recognized in all countries, and for which Turkey has never accepted responsibility for their role in the genocide. I grabbed this book at a library sale because the striking cover caught my attention, and I read it without reading the synopsis first, so I went into it without any expectations.

There are two timelines in the story—one where he is Emmett Conn, an elderly grandfather who was injured in WWI and suffered memory loss, and the other where he is Ahmet Khan, a gendarme tasked with forcing Armenians out of Turkey. The two storylines begin to merge as Emmett starts to experience vivid dreams of events from his past as a result of a brain tumor causing his lost memories to return. Initially, Emmett isn’t difficult to like. But my feelings changed as soon as we’re introduced to him in his late teens.

As a gendarme, Ahmet is responsible for the forced evacuation of the Armenians and a participant in atrocities during what became known as the Armenian genocide. Armenians from Turkey are forced onto a death march to Aleppo, Syria, and at risk of starvation, rape, and murder from the gendarmes. Ahmet’s actions were appalling, and I had a hard time with the story that humanized him. A teen girl with two different colored eyes, one blue and one brown, caught his attention and while he planned to rape her first, he ended up seeing this one woman as a human being, rather than dehumanized simply for being Armenian. I didn’t find him to be a likable character as a young man, despite the arc that his story took, I still had a tough time with his horrific actions. Treating one Armenian girl differently doesn’t negate all of the bad things he’s done, and this was the part of the book that I struggled with the most. 

As for the plot, the WWI timeline involves Ahmet getting lured by Araxie’s beauty, and finding reasons to engage with her. But no matter what she says or does, there really isn’t a choice in a relationship with an uneven balance of power, where Ahmet has all the power simply by the fact of his being Turkish and having weapons, while no matter what Araxie might agree to, it would be impossible to tell if this was the same choice she would have made if she had free will. 

While the book does provide some information about the Armenian genocide, it focuses more on Ahmet, who was just kind of there. He went from raping any woman he wanted to thinking about it first and taking the time to “woo” her. One of the main themes running through the book is the idea of relationships with an imbalance of power, along with the fact that everyone has some good and some bad in them. We get to see that in Ahmet/Emmett especially throughout the story. 

I do have some other criticisms of the book as well. The idea of the head injury and memory loss, combined with a brain tumor that makes those missing memories return all felt a little too convenient to the plot. And the ending felt even more unrealistic to me. There is a little mini twist that pops up that blew my mind, although the author has him doing things that wouldn’t be feasible for a 92 year old man to do. Even if he’s in great shape, the events at the ending required a little too much suspension of belief. 

Overall, this was an interesting read, although it didn’t become a great read to me for the reasons listed above. I liked the way the author writes, and how well he utilized the dual timeline format. Yet I struggled with mixed feelings: I liked Emmett but didn’t like Ahmet, the person he was before escaping to America. This juxtaposition was stark in this story between the life he lived before and the life he lived after, and it had a big impact on how I felt about the book. This is one of those books that is both intriguing and disturbing, and it is most likely going to take up space in my head for some time. 

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